IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2018 - 37

revert to the one person or people they are closest to.
Therefore, relating to the children in ways that expect
them to prefer robots may be a disservice to them,
which may lead to a lack of investment in helping them
develop their social skills through more human than
robot interaction. During our participant observation during the Leicestershire Asperger's group, members
expressed a strong interest in engaging in social activities
even though they struggled with social understanding.
Here are some responses from the parents:
"We always joke he's a lover not a fighter. He's
really affectionate. His hormones haven't kicked
in yet, so he doesn't hit people, the only sort of
challenges we have - he runs off, he's a runner."
"Nobody has actually thought about the issue
is, it is that on a Tuesday morning, his taxi is different. He didn't like the taxi driver so he gets in
the taxi, taxi driver winds him up, he gets out the
car, doesn't really know what to do, somebody
said hello to him and actually he wants to go -
that taxi driver is an idiot. So he hits the person
who has targeted him, we end up restraining him.
So what we brought in with the calm model is that
we actually become, "what is the function of the
behavior that the child or young person is displaying? What are they trying to communicate with
that? What state are they in?"
"Because we are devaluing the relationship, for
a person with autism, they need things acknowledging us so they can deal with them, know them
and shape them and move on. And if we are not
doing that, then we perpetuating the cycle actually
and they become less empathetic. Because we
are not supporting empathy and we are not supporting those kind of things."
Moreover, adults at the Asperger's group can choose
voluntarily which activities to participate in and during
our observations of the group many chose to attend
activities that explored social relating. Adults in the
group ages ranged from 16-65 years old and there were
a mixture of male and female attendees. Adults in the
group were asked questions such as "what should you
do if you go to a party?" or "What are the qualities of
people we like or don't like?"
We believe that the ethics of child-robot interaction, for helping children with autism develop social
behaviors, should value and emphasize the importance
of affective attachments for the child. These important
relationships in the child's life include the mother,
father, siblings, or other significant caregiving others.
This approach does not discount or exclude the real
ontological, and neurodevelopmental difficulties
march 2018

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FiguRE 2. A social skills workshop at a group for Adults with
Asperger's, Leicester, U.K.

experienced by a child with autism. Rather than reject
opportunities to socially interact with others, the adults
in this group actively participated in developing their
social skills by engaging in regular workshops to
improve their social skills. Adults were given specific
scenarios and asked to make choices about appropriate
social behaviors. Questions included "what makes a
good friend" or "what makes a good work colleague."
(See Figure 2.) In conversations with the young adults,
they reported that bullying had been a problem for
them, and although they wanted to make friends at
school, they had not been accepted by their classmates.
Perhaps this may go some way to explain why children
with autism might seem to prefer using robots or technological tools. Also this shows that as with any child
facing bullying or rejection, they eventually turn to
things that they see as more accepting to them. This is
different from lacking social skills and preferring robots.
In Romania, observing the experiments, it was clear
there were strong bonds between the children with
autism and their parents. The children actively tried to
keep their parents close by during the experiments.

Reflections
If we are to build better technologies for the benefit of
humanity, we must ensure that we start from the accurate premises that all humans share a common identity
as a species. As a species, social attachment to others
is crucial to each human being's survival. Children
come into the world without the necessary cognitive,
motor, social, and emotional skills necessary to survive.
These developmental aspects of the human being develop over time with help and support from adult caregivers. Moreover, as a society we have established ethical
principles about the way we treat each other as human

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